Ingenuous!brilliant design sketches for interactivity using the back of the phone as a touch-sensitive input device.
If there is a patent, it could make somebody rich...
Otherwise, it will make world a better place!

Each of these is free-as-in-beer, which means you can download the complete version without expectation for anything in return. I think most of them are available for purchase as well, if you prefer a hard copy. Some of them include code samples in R, Python or MATLAB.

"Cockroach is a distributed key/value datastore which supports ACID transactional semantics and versioned values as first-class features. The primary design goal is global consistency and survivability, hence the name. Cockroach aims to tolerate disk, machine, rack, and even datacenter failures with minimal latency disruption and no manual intervention. Cockroach nodes are symmetric; a design goal is one binary with minimal configuration and no required auxiliary services."

Rich Hickey, creator of Clojure programming language has also designed a matching database. Datomic has some quite special properties, based on principles of simplicity. By the way, he also gave a special presentation to explain difference of "symple" and "easy".

All data in Datomic are represented as a tree of such values.
The only "schema" are definitions of Attributes.

The crucial distinction from most of other information systems is the requirement to include time (in the form of transaction).
That is based on observation that any information is not complete without defining when it is added to the system.
In this case that is crucial, since "changes" are in fact new assignments of values to same Identity and Attribute, just at different time.

For example, field "Address" can have one address at one time, and some time later when the person moves, a new value can be assigned. The old value still stays in the system, to preserve consistency of the system, and enable easy historical queries, based on any snapshot of database state in previous time.

Based on described "information architecture" the system separates function of "write" to system, that is transactional and very scalable, since it does not do anything else. The read from the system is enabled by separate "readers", that are again simple and could be added as needed to handle the load.

There are many other nice properties, such as ability to represent queries / program as data (that is based on Clojure's Lisp heritage), and nice ability to match various data models, including

The Architecture of Datomic: @ InfoQ"This representation has obvious similarities to the Subject/Predicate/Object data model of RDF statements. However, without a temporal notion or proper representation of retraction, RDF statements are insufficient for representing historical information. Being oriented toward business information systems, Datomic adopts the closed-world assumption, avoiding the challenges of universal naming, open-world, shared semantics etc of the semantic web. A Datom is a minimal and sufficient representation of a fact."

Datomic is almost perfect data management platform, with one significant shortcoming: it does not come with data synchronization tool for distributed environment, and identity resolution. That is for a good reason: to keep it simple.

There is likely a possibility to combine that platform with Semantic-Web like ontology based brokers.

The key issue, in my opinion, is that the such nice system is not separated from its "abstract" information model. It would be nice to have a simple specification, such as HTML/HTTP is for WWW, and then prominent implementation(s)...

Nginx uses an asynchronousevent-driven approach to handling requests, instead of the Apache HTTP Server model that defaults to a threaded orprocess-oriented approach, where the Event MPM is required for asynchronous processing. Nginx's modular event-driven architecture[17] can provide more predictable performance under high loads.[18]

XBMC is an award-winning free and open source (GPL) software media player and entertainment hub that can be installed on Linux, OSX, Windows, iOS, and Android, featuring a 10-foot user interface for use with televisions and remote controls. It allows users to play and view most videos, music, podcasts, and other digital media files from local and network storage media and the internet. Our forums and Wiki are bursting with knowledge and help for the new user right up to the application developer. We also have helpful Facebook, Google+, Reddit, Twitter and Youtube pages....In addition to creating XBMC, the members of Team XBMC have created an official- XBMC Remote Control for Android- XBMC Remote Control for iOS

The small, Volkswagen Bug-esque vehicle does not have a steering wheel, accelerator pedal, or brake pedal, "because they don't need them," Google said in a blog post. Just get in, and Google's car will take you to your destination with the push of a button.

Tuesday, May 27, 2014

Raspberry Pi for Developers - Online Training Course for Developers: @ pluralsight"Raspberry Pi is a low-cost computing platform that provides a way to building interesting applications using common programming languages. It also opens up the possibility of interesting hardware scenarios as well. This course will cover the basics of what you need to get up and running with the Raspberry Pi."

"The earlier filing (Patent No. 8,577,392) described how an iPhone or iPad could be used to control “lighting systems, security systems, garage-door openers, music controllers, climate controllers, or kitchen appliances” – in fact it could be similar in scope to AirPlay and iBeacon, but geared towards home automation products and appliances."

Sunday, May 25, 2014

Sylvia Earle, Tierney Thys: Oceanic - The Long Now"Two-thirds of global fisheries are overfished. Eating a tuna, Earle points out, is like eating a wolf or a tiger. It is a magnificent predator often decades in age. We no longer commercially harvest wildlife on land. Why do we do it in the sea?

...

A sea-going photosynthetic bacteria named prochlorococcus was identified as recently as 1986, yet it may be the most abundant species on Earth, responsible for half of all the oxygen in the atmosphere"Oceans significantly getting more acidic, due to increased CO2 dissolved in water, affecting ecological balance...

Big and lethal American drones have changed the equation of global power projection in the last decade. Raised big moral and legal and strategic questions in skies around the world. Now, a swarm of smaller drones is chomping at the bit to flood America’s skies. The FAA is still working out the rules, but some aren’t waiting. We had a near-miss with an airliner just reported in Florida. They’re calling it the Wild West up there. And it’s just begunAbout Us | 3drobotics.com3D Robotics develops innovative, flexible and reliable personal drones and UAV technology for everyday exploration and business applications.

Kinect-like features in an Android device (phone or tablet).
Coming soon, likely to be released to select developers at Google I/O conference in June, as an 7" tablet with 2 cameras and distance sensors, to track 3D view of environment, for indoor navigation, gaming, and whatever comes next...

ATAP Project Tango – Google: current prototype is a 5” Android phone containing highly customized hardware and software designed to track the full 3-dimensional motion of the device as you hold it while simultaneously creating a map of the environment. These sensors allow the phone to make over a quarter million 3D measurements every second updating its position and orientation in real-time combining that data into a single 3D model of the space around you.

JSON object (dictionary) as universal representation, including for arrays, that are effectively mapping of integer index to value.Dictionary properties can be "split" and "re-assembled", to help partial data retrieval and updates.

Reactive REST: @ InfoQJafar Husain explains how Netflix uses reactive programming to build and consume REST endpoints, and how they work around the limitations of the HTTP protocol to create high-performance REST APIs.

Friday, May 23, 2014

"Microsoft feels that System.Web needs to be removed because it is actually quite expensive. A typical HttpContext object graph can consume 30K of memory per request. When working with small JSON-style requests this represents a disproportionately high cost. With MVC 6 new design, the pre-request overhead drops to roughly 2K.

Included in MVC 6 is Web API and Web Pages, allowing Microsoft to remove a lot of the overlap between the three frameworks. One result of this change means that MVC will be self-hosting just like Web API 2 and SignalR 2.

In order to make deployment easier and more reliable, “vNext will support true side-by-side deployment.” Rather than being installed in the GAC, each MVC library needed for a given web site will be referenced like a normal developer-created DLL. “That means you can update your app without affecting other applications on the same server.”

"The problem Bitcoin solved, says Andreessen, was known as the Byzantine General’s Problem:ANDREESSEN: The metaphor basically is you have a group of generals in the Byzantine Empire and they’ve surrounded a huge city. And there are these encampments that these generals have all around the city. And at some point they’re going to lay siege to the city. But they have a coordination problem, which is they have to be able to communicate with each other to develop the battle plan and to decide when to launch the attack. And so they’re sending runners back and forth between the cities. The twist to it is some of the generals are traitors. But none of the other generals know which ones are traitors.

And so the question is how do you coordinate a significant number of people who don’t know each other and don’t trust each other being able to communicate securely and be able to basically establish digital trust. And as you’re probably well aware, digital trust is a concept that’s brand new. You know, one of the huge problems of the Internet over 20 years is who do you trust, which websites do you trust, which people do you trust when you do a transaction, who do you trust?

And so this idea of the Byzantine Generals Problem turns out to apply directly to the Internet as a whole. One of the things as a consequence that’s been missing on the Internet for 20 years is kind of a native concept of money, right? And so, the ability to very easily pay somebody online, the ability to very easily charge for a piece of content, the ability to very easily exchange a digital title, or a digital key, or a digital contract has just been missing because you have no mechanism for establishing trust. And so Bitcoin basically holds out the promise of being the first solution to establishing trust over an untrusted network."

Just recently, a solution for "Byzantine Generals Problem" was referenced in relation to Leslie Lamport, Touring award winner, who actually defined the term and proposed solution now commonly used in core network protocols.

Well, general Internet is already (almost) ubiquitous as electricity.
It is interesting to start thinking about IoT as a "data service", and "utility".
And why limit to data from "things", there are other data that make for useful services.
"Data Smart Web"

Wednesday, May 21, 2014

"One of the first steps in learning to think like a freak is learning to say “I don’t know.” Why? Because until you can admit what you don’t know, it’s virtually impossible to learn what you need to. Because if you think you already have all the answers, you won’t go looking for them. But let’s be clear: simply saying “I don’t know” isn’t a solution. It’s just a first step. You have to figure out what you don’t know – and then work like a dog to learn.

The thing about always faking is that if you fake like you know the answer, you don’t have the freedom to explore other possibilities. But if you actually care about the outcome and the truth, saying ‘I don’t know’ is critical. One thing we’ve learned is that the only way to learn is through feedback. That whether you’re a human being, an animal or an organization, the way that you learn is by trying different things and seeing the outcome when you try different approaches, and comparing those outcomes."

The shrine buildings at Naikū and Gekū, as well as the Uji Bridge, are rebuilt every 20 years as a part of the Shinto belief of the death and renewal of nature and the impermanence of all things — wabi-sabi — and as a way of passing building techniques from one generation to the next.

Use the REST APIs to programmatically create subscriptions that notify your service when a specific event occurs in a team project. For example, create a subscription to notify your service when a build fails. When a user signs up for your service, you can let them choose what notifications they want and then create the subscriptions for them so that they don't have to set them up manually.

"CShell is an interactive C# scripting environment. It allows you to use C# without any fluff right in a console like environment called a read-eval-print-loop (REPL). Your code is directly evaluated and executed in a shell window, no separate executable has to be compiled and then run in a different process. More elaborate code can be written in a C# script and then evaluated as one file, only one line, or a selection. Then, your results can be easily dumped to HTML (like LINQPad) or viewed as a data grid or plotted to a chart."

In a brief statement on the Central Government Procurement Centre's website about a particular class of energy-saving products, the agency noted that new government computers are forbidden from having Windows 8 installed."

...the move is the Chinese government's response to Microsoft's recent end to support and security updates for Windows XP, which still runs most government computers....the government has "moved to avoid the awkwardness of being confronted with a similar situation again in future if it continues to purchase computers with [a] "foreign OS".

...the first step to supporting a homegrown OS is to promote the use of "Chinese-designed" (Linux based) OS among official users...

Is it time for Microsoft to introduce its own Linux distribution, i.e. "Winux" all with Office and official subscription support, and XP and Live Tiles "themes"...

Monday, May 19, 2014

A fascinating scientific story about relatively recent human history (9000 years back). AI game-like simulation is used to identify likely behavior of hunted animals and people, to identify likely locations of submerged remains of hunting traps.

The water level was 150 feed (50m) lower than today before melting of ice.
And it was successful, they did find them under water.

An there is in fact a rational explanation what "Cloud First" means:
Windows, SQL Server, Office etc, a now being developed for Azure first,
as a temporary branch from the main product.
Those "cloud" changes are done, deployed and updated faster,
and then selectively included in "boxed" product releases for enterprise.
So it really is "cloud first".

Similar may be true for Mobile, since desktop features and apps are now usually following those developed for mobile devices...
"Metro GUI" appeared first on Windows Phone...
maybe it should have stayed there a bit longer :)

Saturday, May 17, 2014

"There’s also been a proliferation of attendees at meetings where the average meeting size has grown over time. And our research on decision making has basically supported what we call the Rule of Seven which says, for every person you add to a meeting over, above seven, the effectiveness of that meeting goes down by 10%.

The effectiveness being gaged by the quality and your ability to actually reach decisions and outcomes in that setting. Say that, by the time you reach 17 people in a meeting, you’re actually not making any decisions"

The feature, which launched Friday, seems to work for much of the U.S. and Canada. Google says Maps already factored in elevation when determining routes for cyclists, but until now the elevation data wasn’t made easily visible."

Friday, May 16, 2014

"Windows Azure Pack for Windows Server is a collection of Windows Azure technologies, available to Microsoft customers at no additional cost for installation into your data center. It runs on top of Windows Server 2012 R2 and System Center 2012 R2 and, through the use of the Windows Azure technologies, enables you to offer a rich, self-service, multi-tenant cloud, consistent with the public Windows Azure experience."

This global open competition aims to recognize, promote and reward innovators, entrepreneurs and early-stage startup businesses that can help us transform the industry by connecting the unconnected. Three winners of the Internet of Things Innovation Grand Challenge will share US $250,000 in award money that can be used to jumpstart new and existing businesses. "

Features of the Tiva C Series Connected LaunchPad include: • Onboard 10/100 Ethernet MAC+PHY with advanced-line diagnostics for smart identification of cabling issues. Integrated CAN and USB provide high-speed connectivity for the creation of gateway applications."

Nikola Tesla (1856-1943) was a Serbian-American engineer and unsung inventor who helped pioneer the use of electricity, among other achievements. A campaign is underway, aided by entrepreneur Elon Musk, to turn Tesla's last remaining laboratory into a museum.

Open a command prompt as administrator, then type "winsat prepop" and press Enter. This will run the benchmark and store the results on your PC as XML files.

Open the Windows Powershell as administrator, then type "Get-WmiObject -Class Win32_WinSAT" and press Enter. This will analyze the results in the XML files, then present them as scores for each category